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Digital
SoundCloud hit by DDoS attack
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 7 October 2011
SoundCloud has revealed that it suffered two days of prolonged downtime this week due to one of those Distributed Denial Of Service attacks. The perpetrators of the attack, or their motives, have not yet been identified.
In a statement published on its blog, the company said yesterday: “From Tuesday 9pm CET until last night Wednesday 7pm CET, we’ve been defending against an unidentified denial of service attack. After seeing the service stabilise for a few hours yesterday morning, unfortunately a second denial of service attack occurred around noon CET as the attackers adjusted to our preventive measures. This attack delayed full mitigation until we were able to implement more robust measures which are now in place. Around 7pm CET last night, our scalable defensive measures were in operation and we were able to stabilise the service gradually. As of this morning, all services are fully back and operational”.
As much previously reported, DDoS attacks, which take sites offline by flooding their servers with traffic, have become an increasingly popular measure by online activists of late. Usually websites targeted belong to organisations who, the attackers believe, infringe freedom of speech or enforce copyrights unreasonably. Quite what these attackers have against SoundCloud isn’t clear. Although the company does take down uncleared content if asked to do so by a rights owner – as copyright law forces it to – it’s hard to see what else SoundCloud could have done to offend anyone in this way.
